There are a lot of pop-up terminal emulators like tilda, vterminal, guake, Yakuake or Yeahconsole to choose from, but if none of them satisfies you (none of them supports "drag and drop" functionality for example), I will present here two guides that can be used to turn any ordinary terminal (gnome-terminal, xfce4-terminal, konsole) into a neat pop-up terminal.

[The guides might look a bit long but that's mainly because I have included instructions for all the most popular ubuntu flavours - ubuntu, kubuntu and xubuntu.]

Guide #1Pros:

Any keyboard shortcut can be used to hide the terminal

Cons:

This guide will NOT work with default Xfce window manager xfwm4, because xfwm4 doesn't allow minimizing windows that have "skip_tasklist" attribute set. However, it will work for xfce users who use compiz instead of xfwm4.

konsole. Right click on the terminal and choose "Configure current profile" from the menu, then put Terminal as profile name. Plus there is one more step for this to work: go to "Tabs" tab and replace "Tab title format" with %w.

Edit the rule to customize terminal size and position (note the comments in the code)

Open xbindkeys configuration file (KDE users should use kate and xfce - mousepad instead of gedit)

Code:

gedit ~/.xbindkeysrc

Remove default rules (in most cases they are hindering more than helping) and add one of the following rules depending on what terminal emulator you are using (you can run "xbindkeys -k" to see how your preferred keyboard shortcut should be defined):

Gnome. Run gnome-keybinding-properties and specify some keyboard shortcut for minimizing windows (if you can't find "Window Management" section there, it means that you are using compiz and should follow the same instructions as XFCE users in this case).

XFCE. For this guide to work in XFCE you have to be using compiz. So, install compizconfig-settings-manager, run it (ccsm), select "General Options", "Key bindings" tab and specify some keyboard shortcut for minimizing windows.

XFCE. Run xfce4-session-settings and go to "Application Autostart" tab.

KDE. Run systemsettings and go to "Startup and Shutdown".

Finally you can log-out and log-in again (or just run xbindkeys and devilspie) and press keyboard shortcut you specified in xbindkeys config (8th step, Alt+Z by default) to start/show the terminal and the shortcut you specified for minimizing applications to hide it.

Guide #2Pros:

Can be used with any window manager including xfwm4 (default xfce4 window manager)

Cons:

Unless you figure out how to fix alltray, very few keyboard buttons will be available for hiding the terminal.

Edit the script to suit your taste. Here are a couple of things that you might want to edit:

660x400 here represents the size of the window

+706+210 determines window position (+x+y) relative to the upper left corner of the screen

-k switch followed by keycode determines the keyboard button to be used to hide the terminal. xev or "xbindkeys -k" command line utilities can be used to find out the keycode (135 is Menu - the key that acts like right mouse button). The problem here is that alltray hasn't been updated for a really long time and because of the changes to Xorg server now most of the keys can not be used here - they just cause alltray to crash. Some of the keys that worked for me are PrtSc (107), Menu (135), Insert (118).

-st switch means that the terminal will be visible on all workspaces (you can run "alltray --help" for some info about the other switches used here)

Make it executable:

Code:

chmod +x ~/.terminal.sh

Open xbindkeys configuration file (KDE users should use kate and xfce - mousepad instead of gedit):

Code:

gedit ~/.xbindkeysrc

Replace the contents of the file with the following rule which will determine the keyboard shortcut that will be used to show our terminal (in the example "Alt + W" is the shortcut but it can be replaced with anything that suits your taste- just run "xbindkeys -k" to see how your preferred keyboard shortcut should be defined)

XFCE. Run xfce4-session-settings and go to "Application Autostart" tab.

KDE. Run systemsettings and go to "Startup and Shutdown".

Now you can log-out and log-in again (or just run xbindkeys) and press keyboard shortcut you specified in xbindkeys config (7th step, Alt+W by default) to start/show the terminal and the shortcut you specified in .terminal.sh script (steps 4 & 5, keycode after -k switch) to hide it.

Tips

xbindkeys has a handy tool for finding out how to define some hotkey:

Code:

xbindkeys -k

After executing the command just press some keys at once and you should see two ways to define the key combination.

At least in ubuntu 10.10 and older it install just fine. If you are afraid that the deb package might break something, you can install it manually by just downloading the archive attached to this post, then launching nautilus as root ("sudo nautilus") and extracting the script in the archive to /usr/local/bin .